How are you supporting local leaders to create a happy workforce and delighted customers?

In every service based industry, your workforce is your most important asset. There are many, interrelated factors that need to align in order for you to have a happy workforce, with appropriate skills, knowledge and great customer behaviours. It requires a good corporate culture combined with inspirational leadership to underpin successful customer interactions.

Very few organisations deliver a consistently great experience to every single customer every day. Yet many are striving to do so and there are some simple steps that can help increase the likelihood of delivering great customer care and help your leaders make the best decisions.

Your workforce is your most important issue and in many service industries, a significant spend that directly impacts your bottom line. So how could some basic workforce management functions support you deliver great customer care every time?

1. Resource to deliver your corporate service standardsEnsure you understand the resource required to deliver to your defined service standards by thoroughly understanding the tasks and associated workload. It requires activity to create a well stocked and presented store, to present promotions to best effect and to achieve the sort of customer conversations your brand promise depends on.Work study will allow you to understand the workload for each location and the associated salary budget required to deliver your service standards. It supports organisations to allocate salary by store effectively and enables business leaders to make quick, evidence-based resourcing decisions.2. Meet Customer Demand – all day, every day

Once you understand the salary allocation for each outlet, you can support local managers break down their periodic salary budget and plan activities to best meet customer demand using a range of tools. These tools can be based on simple spreadsheets with an easy to use front end attached or can be more complex systems that link through to or provide your payroll functions.There are a wide range of options available and independent advice can help you choose the right option for your business.

3. Enable flexible working for colleagues

Delivery of great customer experience is linked to having a happy team and ensuring you have the best employees available to you. Increasingly colleagues want the ability to work flexibly and employers that facilitate more flexibility will have the capacity to attract and retain the best people. (How well do you cope when your best people wish to return part-time after maternity leave, take on caring responsibilities within their family or simply want to remain in work but do fewer hours?). Planning systems allow local managers to easily manage the sort of complex staffing plans that are required to facilitate flexible working. Have you considered what difference it would make to your customers and business if your team could work more flexibly?

4. Integrated AnalyticsWorkforce systems provide key statistics on how well each location is doing in meeting one of the essentials for great customer care – availability. Leading businesses take the opportunity to use key workforce systems stats to data from other sources to create insights and better understand the return on investment in their most important asset.ReThink provides independent and practical advice and consultancy to support businesses to deliver their customer strategy and brand promise for all four of the above elements. For more information visit our websitewww.rethinkproductivity.co.uk or emailsimon@rethinkproductivity.co.uk